Neil Chowdhury

Government Takes On Journalism’s Next Chapter

This article in the New York Times today disturbed me on a number of levels. The old business model of journalism is dying due to the instant availability of free content on the internet, but what is the solution? Here government subsidy is being pitched as a possible alternative. Of course this raises huge questions. If the US Government pays for journalism, how do we avoid the obvious conflict of interest? If the government doesn’t want a story to get out, they can simply withhold funding from any news organization that dares to report it.

I would argue, however that this is already happening on a more subtle level. Big journalistic organizations have already consolidated ownership to a few huge corporations to which the government is beholden through campaign contributions and other influence. We haven’t had a truly free press in a long time. The current zombie press has no independence from it’s corporate masters. Do we really know what is happening in Afghanistan, Iraq, or the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico? What about the dozens of countries where the US is involved in covert military activities that we never even hear about?

Unfortunately, the great hope of optimists, the progressive movement, etc., so called “citizen journalism”, falls prey to ideological bias even more easily, as this phenomenon has no oversight and is responsible to nobody. In our so called “Age of Information”, the overwhelming stream of information to which we have become addicted contains an undifferentiated muddle of fact, fiction, and propaganda. The line between fact, opinion, and outright falsehood has become irrevocably blurred, or simply erased. This situation places on the individual the responsibility to distinguish the real from the spurious, but who has the time, knowledge, and perspective to sort through this overwhelming mess? At the end, we will all choose to believe whatever best suits our world view. Things are getting mighty blurry here at the back of Plato’s cave. Rather than a common agreement on the nature of history, current events and reality, it seems our society is splintering into loosely defined groups of individuals, all having their own take on what is really going on. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing after all, but isn’t a more or less common view of reality the foundation of culture, society, and nation-state? In the modern age, a free press in which we could all more or less believe has been instrumental in creating that common experience that forms our views & binds us as a people. Now the future of this institution is in grave doubt, the scary part is that nobody knows what will replace it.

Well, this is supposed to be a blog about photography, so I will end with the idea that the new context sensitive editing abilities of Photoshop CS 5 seem to me a perfect metaphor for the era in which we are now living. I can’t wait to get my hands on that so I can effortlessly make the world look the way I wish it was-just like the new journalism!